Many founders either write off analyst relations (AR) as “pay-to-play” or engage only after they’ve been overlooked in a Magic Quadrant or other industry research. But as we’ve discussed before, analyst relations can quietly make—or break—your enterprise go-to-market. In fact, if you programmatize your AR well, analysts can become invaluable sources of product feedback, shape buyer perception, and underscore your credibility in key deals.
In what follows, we outline why engaging with analysts is so important, explain how to frame up engagements with analysts, offer a programmatic approach to AR over a 3–5 year time horizon once you start selling into traditional verticals, sketch out a guide to analyst notes, and address three of the most common questions we get from founders.
Why engaging with analysts matters
Analysts shape the buying patterns of the biggest enterprises…
Though some founders are wary of engaging with analysts, the reality is that analyst firms like Gartner influence billions in IT spend, especially among what we call the Lagging 70%—or the half of slower-moving buyers that drive the 70% of enterprise technology spending. These companies use analysts to help them figure out the new technologies and the vendors they should be considering and why.
…which means they can teach you about the market…
This is one of the most important elements of AR that founders overlook: analysts are one of the only resources that can give you unvarnished opinions on your product—whether from themselves or from your existing or potential customers—and your market position without the biases from your internal teams or strategic partners. Think of it this way: analysts talk to hundreds of your buyers for hours a day, every day. Don’t you want to know what those buyers are saying about your company, product, and competition?
…as much as you can teach them.
The best analyst relations are reciprocal. Think of analysts like professional students: it’s their job to become experts in their domains, understand complex issues, and then distill them into comprehensible models. That means they can learn from you as much as you can learn from them. If you don’t educate them on why your product is the best solution for a given problem, you’ll let your competition define your problem or market for you. (And if paying to be included in Magic Quadrants really worked, don’t you think we all would have caught on by now? Besides, some of the vendors most frustrated with analysts are the ones who pay the most.)
That said, engaging with analysts isn’t for every startup. Most crypto, prosumer, and consumer startups don’t need to engage because consumers have other ways of vetting that software. But for most B2B startups and major technology companies, analysts are a critical part of the buying process for most customers. While analyst firms like Forrester publish influential research like the Wave, Gartner is one of the most important analyst firms to build a relationship with because they’ve grown in scale significantly over the past several years and dominate the market. As such, we’ve focused chiefly on Gartner in what follows.
A programmatic approach to analyst relations
Founders generally have the most success with AR when they align their engagements with the maturity of their top-down selling efforts. Below, we’ve broken out the key stages of each type of analyst engagement, along with the requisite investments, cadence of engagement, and key outcomes.
Early stage: inbound response
- You’re here if: you’re selling to startups or early adopters, like other technology companies
- Investment: respond to inbound analyst inquiries
- Cadence: responsive only
- Relationship owned by: CEOs to follow up
- Key outcomes: understand analyst priorities and reason for inbound interest
If you’re selling to individuals, early adopters—like startups or dev teams—AR will likely be a distraction. Your customers at this stage aren’t reading analyst reports, and you don’t have the time or resources to educate analysts.
We’ve seen founders engage analysts too early and see limited benefit because analysts weren’t yet seeing client interest about the category or the startup didn’t have the resources to devote to building the relationship with the analysts.
You can track the analysts in your space and should respond to inbound analyst inquiries about your company (it’s good that they know who you are!) but hold off on proactive briefings until your buyer profile shifts.
Non-commercial relationship: one-way briefing
- You’re here if: you’re considering or have just started driving awareness to traditional verticals like retail, banking, and healthcare
- Investment: founders’ and product marketings’ time to brief and update the analysts in your space
- Cadence: maintain contact every 1–2 months; no less than once every 6 months
- Relationship owned by: CEO and product marketing
- Key outcomes: analyst awareness of your company and your product; potential inclusion in research notes
Non-commercial analyst relationships provide you access to briefings, or one-way conversations in which you’re educating the analyst on the problem you’re solving and how your product is uniquely positioned to solve it. Once you’ve started saturating the early adopter market and are starting to sell into larger, traditional enterprises, these briefings can help you build awareness of your differentiated product and early success selling into those verticals.
Founders are usually the best people to do these briefings, since it demonstrates that you’re taking this engagement seriously, and oftentimes, your inspiration to start the company can be your best positioning. Use briefings as an opportunity to outline your product roadmap, educate the analyst on the technical advantages of your approach—since many analysts are quite technical—and highlight the specific early traction you have with traditional verticals. Remember, these analysts are experts in their particular fields, so try to avoid telling them the size or shape of the market. Instead, use the time you have with them describing why you, why now.
In between briefings, keep analysts up-to-date on your progress against the product and customer acquisition roadmap you outlined in those briefings through newsletters and periodic emails.
Now is also a good time to explore Peer Insights at Gartner, a customer review platform where customers rate the software they use. It aggregates firsthand feedback—both quantitative scores and qualitative comments—across deployments, use cases, and support experiences. Buyers use Peer Insights to validate vendor claims, compare alternatives, and uncover real-world pros and cons, while vendors can respond publicly to reviews and surface customer testimonials in sales cycles. Given this, it’s a good idea to entice your happy customers to leave a review—we’ve seen successful companies include Peer Insights reviews as an opt-out clause in contracts. Analysts refer to Peer Insights when drawing up Magic Quadrants and other docs, so keep your eye on your reviews and reach out to customers if you see negative feedback to make sure you’re fixing whatever problems they cite.
Commercial relationship: two-way dialogue
- You’re here if: you have traction selling into traditional verticals
- Investment: annual subscription + 25–30% of an FTE’s role to manage the relationship
- Cadence: at a minimum, inquiries, briefings, and newsletters every 3–4 weeks
- Relationship owned by: led by product marketing, CEO and CMO to remain involved
- Key outcomes: deep understanding of how the market views the space and your product; increased awareness and positive sentiment among analysts who cover your space; potential inclusion in research notes
Whereas a non-commercial relationship allows you to have one-way briefings with an analyst, opening a commercial relationship allows you to have two-way dialogue about the market you’re operating in, your buyers thoughts and opinions, and how you solve customers’ problems. If your non-commercial relationship helped you build awareness among the enterprise, your commercial relationship gives you additional market intelligence and insights to adjust your product roadmap, market more effectively, price competitively, and (hopefully) close more deals in the enterprise.
Specifically, a vendor subscription gives you access to analyst inquiries, written research, notes reviews, and access to a themed Summit event where you can meet analysts and buyers within your market.
- Inquiries and follow ups. You now have the opportunity to ask your analysts: what topics, questions, or inquiries are they getting about your company? From whom? What is their perspective on how customer needs or the market is evolving? How can you position your value proposition with those buyers better? Gartner won’t share names of companies, but can share regions, roles, and industries of those asking. Once you have that information, you can incorporate it in both your product and your marketing.
- Events. Attending analyst events (i.e., Summits, Regional Events) gives you direct access to very specific buying centers, like CISOs or CIOs. They can also help you gather information about the market, your buyers, and your competition.
- Strategic Advisory Session (SAS) Days. These give you direct access to Gartner’s analyst insights, which can help you validate strategic decisions and de-risk new initiatives. Sessions can be delivered either onsite or virtually. In both cases, a Gartner analyst can lead a customized presentation, strategy discussion, or interactive workshop tailored to your needs. Note: SAS Days incur an additional fee.
In order to shoulder this added legwork, you’ll need a dedicated internal owner (often a PMM) who can manage analyst relationships, prepare briefings, and channel analyst insights back into product, marketing, and sales. Oftentimes, this dedicated resource will work with 6–10 analysts: 4 whom they’ll work with regularly, then up to 6 that could cover adjacent markets or as influencers.
Dedicated AR team: many-to-many flywheel
- You’re here if: the majority of your revenue comes from traditional verticals; you have multiple product lines; you’re selling internationally
- Investment: 1–4 AR managers coordinating across many analysts, products, and marketing teams
- Cadence: quarterly briefings, weekly analyst touchpoints, annual MQ and/or other research methodology prep cycles
- Relationship owned by: analyst relations team, CEO/product marketing/CMO remain involved
- Key outcomes: create a flywheel between your company and analyst firms in order to build and position the best product suite for your market; potential inclusion in research notes
At this scale, analysts aren’t just a validation layer—they’re a strategic partner. Whereas a founder or PMM starts facilitating information exchanges early in your commercial relationship, the difference at this stage is scale. You have more products deployed across more markets, which means you’ll need a dedicated AR team to engage with analysts in those markets, glean useful information about how buyers across sectors view your solution and your competition, and synthesize those inputs into actionable feedback for your teams. If you put this unvarnished feedback to work effectively, it can give you a significant edge against your competition.
At this stage, then, the goal is to create a flywheel between key parts of your company and the analyst firm. For instance, let’s say you’re building an AI voice assistant. Your AR team knows that Gartner is publishing research on voice AI assistance and has spoken with a particular analyst who has an especially strong opinion on the technology. Your AR team can then connect your communications and marketing teams with that analyst in order to echo that thinking in your next launch.
In order for your AR team to draw the right connections between your org and the analyst firm, then, it’s important to deepen your relationships with your analysts and to broaden the number of analysts that you work with directly. The more those analysts feel like part of your team, the more bought in they are to your company and your products. Update your analysts on where you’re winning today and where you’re headed—including your market vision, product roadmap, pricing and packaging, and marketing—not just where you’ve been. Make sure your analysts have the most relevant information to share with your customers and buyers and encourage them to proactively reach out to you with any insights or if they have questions.
A guide to Gartner analyst notes
Now that we’ve discussed our framework for engaging analysts, it’s helpful to understand which analyst notes your customers will read at each stage. Most founders are familiar with Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, but Gartner produces a range of research that maps how technologies and vendors fit into the enterprise buying landscape.
Early on, their reports focus on emerging trends and spotlight innovative upstarts. As the market matures and buyer demand grows, the research shifts toward comparative evaluations that help large enterprises decide who to shortlist, pilot, and buy from.
When working with analysts, the primary goal is to facilitate an open dialogue and share information, not to just appear in a Magic Quadrant or other research. Instead, consider using these notes and what they suggest about how Gartner understands your category as invitations to sharpen your own understanding of your market, competition, and differentiation.
Three questions about Magic Quadrants we hear most from founders
As we mentioned above, being included in a Magic Quadrant isn’t the be-all-end-all of AR. That said, given that Gartner’s Magic Quadrants are one of the most referenced research methodologies in the industry by both vendors and tech buyers, founders understandably have questions about how Gartner compiles it. We’ve outlined our quick hits on the top questions founders ask us below.
Why isn’t there a Magic Quadrant for my solution?
You can’t be in a category of one.
Gartner only builds MQs for mature categories and markets. If there isn’t an MQ for your solution, Gartner might not see enough buyer demand for it yet. You can’t force one to exist, since it’s driven by market signals and not vendor vision.
If you’re creating a new category, the best validation of that is competition. Going back to the idea of helping analysts understand why they are buying your solutions can also be an indicator of where the market is headed to where the current MQ may begin to look obsolete and be shifted into a new MQ.
Why am I not in X Magic Quadrant?
Magic Quadrant inclusion is based on predefined criteria set by Gartner, like revenue thresholds and customer base.
It doesn’t matter how good your product is or how fast you’re growing. If you don’t meet those criteria, you won’t be included, regardless of your potential. This is why it’s important to work with those analysts early to understand the criteria and help them understand why your buyers have chosen you over the competition. Doing this can sometimes even shift that criteria over time.
I don’t want to be part of X Magic Quadrant!
Being in a quadrant, even if it’s not the perfect fit, is better than being invisible.
If Gartner sees you as relevant, they’ll include you whether you like it or not. You don’t get to opt out. That’s why participating is always better than not participating: you can give them the information they need to then better position your company.
Analyst relations, summarized
No matter your stage or spend, the key to analyst relations is relationships: initially with individual analysts, and eventually with analyst firms as a whole.
The journey starts with the founder personally building trust, sharing vision, and educating individual analysts in the early days. As you grow, it evolves into a company-wide capability: a coordinated, many-to-many dialogue that weaves analyst insights into product roadmaps, go-to-market plans, and executive strategy. Once you’re at scale, you can turn the two-way exchange with your analysts—where you both inform analysts about your innovation and learn unfiltered customer feedback—into a powerful flywheel that can cement your market leadership.
We believe the startups who invest in teaching analysts and building trust are the ones who win big later. The results you’ll see down the road begin with the connections you build now.
